I’m not a real birder. I’ve not invested in the expensive accoutrement of cameras and lenses, but I do enjoy meditative afternoons on the porch of our ranch house watching avian visitors swoop down for the grain in the feeders and creating the only sounds to be heard, the beautiful noise of their calls and their fussing.
Birdcalls are the musical backdrop as I write in the casita, the screened outdoor kitchen and dining room that allows a view of the ranch in every direction.
The usual suspects show up for a meal — Green Jays, Northern Cardinals, Vermillion Flycatchers, Red-winged Black Birds, Pyrrhuloxia, and Cactus Wrens.
Away from the ranch compound, the nearby pond offers the sighting of Muscovy Ducks, unidentified flying ducks, and occasional herons. In the monte there are the ever-present Greater Road Runners, roosting Crested Cara Cara, and no doubt countless species my untrained (and dimming) eyes have neither spotted nor named.
Our ranch has hosted Laredo Birding Festival participants for the last few years. It’s been a pleasure to witness their love of birding and their all-business adherence to a tight schedule to move on to the next place, the next ranch, the next spot on the river.
Their visit this year was particularly rewarding. Their enthusiasm to be out in open country was evident, and we — my culinary ranch hand and I — enjoyed their cordiality and sharing the ranch fare meal we had prepared for them.
The group’s driver and guide was Dario Gutierrez, a pharmacist by trade. I knew that Dario had traveled to the Amazon rain forest years back on an herbal green pharmacy expedition with my son’s godfather, the renown Austin herbalist Mark Blumenthal. I’d long heard of Dario, but hadn’t put a face to his name.
It was good to meet him and the Birding Festival’s keynote speaker, Dr. J. Drew Lanham, who made the excursion to the ranch with 10 other birders.
Lanham, an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, would deliver closing remarks a day later at La Posada Hotel.
Lanham’s bearing commands attention, that of a man with deep and sure-footed roots in the natural world. He is also an accomplished academic who has had the literary good fortune to find his voice in memoir to write of family, ties to land, race, birding, and what has fueled his curiosity as a naturalist.
He’s the author of The Home Place, Memoirs of A Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. I am just now reading it, enjoying essays that capture the essence of how family and the wild world have both formed him and informed him.
On the evening he spoke to participants and organizers of the Birding Festival, his words about race and love and nature registered with me as the deeply personal observations of a kindred spirit.
I’m not sure the Laredo Birding Festival has ever had a speaker like J. Drew Lanham who spoke from so tender a place, all at once able to lay out the central themes of his life’s journey, including being the rare bird of a Black ornithologist in a white man’s field.
